For English as a foreign language (EFL) graduate students in STEM, with the need to publish in an international journal comes the double burden of developing general English language skills and discipline-specific writing skills. To help these students effectively, discipline-specific scientific writing (SW) instruction is necessary but has been…

This article introduced a teaching innovation practice, i.e., digital multimodal composing, in College English course in mainland China. The purpose of this practice is to respond to the developing L2 student writers' difficulty of lacking linguistic resources to express their creative ideas, and empower them to leverage multiple modes other than…

With the rapid development of Artificial Intelligence, automatic writing evaluation (AWE) has received much attention from English Foreign Language (EFL) writing teachers. However, the obstacles and potential problems of integrating AWE in EFL writing instruction have yet to be explored. Scholars have indicated that the effectiveness of AWE in EFL…

Writing is one of the most crucial skills for EFL students and also one of the most difficult to acquire. Many students face difficulties when it comes to writing in English. To address this challenge, this study examined whether or not combining inquiry-based learning with visual literacy could enhance EFL students' writing proficiency in four…

This study examined the differences and similarities among the writing of three types of developmental English and advanced ESL United States community college students, comparing the writing of resident English learners (RL2), whose home language was not English but who attended United States public schools for five years or more, to that of…

The purpose of the current dissertation is to map the relationships between first language (L1), writing quality, and syntactic complexity, accuracy, lexical complexity, and fluency (CALF) in second language (L2) writing. CALF are characteristics of language production that have been of significant interest in L2 writing research for the past few…

Writing support programs for students in writing-intensive, disciplinary courses are well established and take many forms, including communication centers, web-based skill development programs, and embedded writing consultants. This paper assesses the effectiveness of a program that embeds a writing grader, who assesses only the grammar of…

Praising is considered to have a positive effect on learners' motivations. Yet, what to praise and how to praise is an issue of controversy. The present study looks at the effect of praising ESL learners' writing efforts in English as opposed to evaluating their writing abilities in order to test Dweck (2007) theory of praising intelligence or…

Background: Experiential educators face difficulties assessing participants and programs because there are so many measurement tools to choose from, many measures have validity issues such as those based on self-reported data, objective tests may not adequately measure social or psychological outcomes, and tests in content disciplines often assess…

Automated scoring based on Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) has been successfully used to score essays and constrained short answer responses. Scoring tests that capture open-ended, short answer responses poses some challenges for machine learning approaches. We used LSA techniques to score short answer responses to the Consequences Test, a measure…

To capitalize on professional expertise in educational assessment, it is desirable to develop and test methods of rater-mediated assessment that enable classroom teachers to make reliable and informative judgments. Accordingly, this article investigates the reliability of a two-stage method used by classroom teachers to assess primary school…

The literature on calibration suggests that students consider a multitude of factors when they self-evaluate task performance. Nevertheless, few studies have focused on calibration within a complex task environment, such as when students are asked to compose written responses based on multiple texts. In this study, we examined the criteria that…

Twenty-first-century learners are "plugged in," fluent with technology, and motivated by social media. Why not embrace their passion and use social media to engage them in authentic and meaningful English-language learning that allows them to practice reading, writing, speaking, and listening in a familiar and motivating context? Author…

Recently, comparative judgement has been introduced as an alternative method for scoring essays. Although this method is promising in terms of obtaining reliable scores, empirical evidence concerning its validity is lacking. The current study examines implications resulting from two critical assumptions underpinning the use of comparative…

In this study, the researchers analyzed writing produced by newcomer immigrant and refugee students in a literacy workshop facilitated by visiting college tutors. Fourteen adolescent students, primarily from Central America, worked over a semester with a college partner to read mentor texts about youth immigration experiences, write their own…